The Good Soldier Svejk (45 page)

"Beg to report, sir, Baloun seemed to be the most satisfactory man on our draft. He's such a thickheaded idiot that he forgets all his drill as soon as he's taught it, and if we was to let him handle a rifle, he'd only do some more damage. The last time he was practising musketry with blank cartridges, he nearly shot the next man's eye out. I thought he'd be all right as an orderly, at any rate."

"And eat up an officer's lunch," said Lieutenant Lukash, "as if his own issue of rations wasn't enough for him. I suppose you'll tell me now that you're hungry, eh?"

"Beg to report, sir, I'm properly hungry. If anyone's got any bread left over from his rations, I buy it from him for cigarettes, and even then it don't seem enough, somehow. It's just the way I'm made. Just when I think I can't eat any more, I feel as if I'd got nothing inside me. If I see somebody eating, or just smell food, my inside comes over all empty like. Why, when I feel like that, I could chew up nails. Beg to report, sir, I made one application to receive a double issue of rations, and I went before the M. O. at Budejovice, but he gave me medicine and duty and ordered them to give me nothing all day but a small bowl of plain soup. 'I'll teach you to be hungry, you impudent lout,' he says ; 'just you come here again,' he says, 'and you'll be as thin as a rake before you get away again.' As soon as I see anything that's good to eat, it just makes my mouth water. I can't help it, sir. Beg to report, sir, I'd take it as a great favour if you'd let me have a double issue of rations. If it's not meat, something else'll do ; some pudding, potatoes, dumplings, a little gravy—it all helps to keep you going."

"Well, of all the bloody impudence!" remarked Lieutenant Lukash. "Sergeant, have you ever come across a soldier with as much confounded cheek as this fellow? He eats my lunch, and then on top of that, wants me to let him get a double issue of rations ! I'll see that you get a thundering big belly ache for this, my fine fellow.

"Now then, Sergeant," he continued, turning to Quartermaster-sergeant Vanek, "you take this man to Corporal Weiden-hofer and tell him to tie him up for two hours near the cookhouse door, until the rations of stew are issued this evening. He's

to tie him up properly, so that he can only just stand on tiptoe, and so that he can see the stew cooking in the saucepan. And tell him to keep the blighter tied up while the stew rations are being issued in the cook house, so that it'll make his mouth water like a hungry tike sniffing outside a butcher's shop. And tell them to let someone else have his rations."

"Very good, sir. Come along, Baloun."

When they were on their way out, the lieutenant stopped them in the doorway, and looking at Baloun's horrified countenance, he remarked gloatingly :

"You've done it this time, Baloun. Well, I hope you'll enjoy your feed. And if you try any more of those tricks on me, I'll have you court-martialled without any beating about the bush."

When Quartermaster-sergeant Vanek returned and announced that Baloun was already tied up, Lieutenant Lukash said :

"You know me well enough, Vanek, to be quite sure I don't like doing that sort of thing. But I can't help myself. I can't have a low blighter like that around me. And it'll have a good moral effect on the rank-and-file when they see Baloun tied up. These fellows who're on draft and know they're going to the front in a day or two think they can do what they damn well please."

Lieutenant Lukash looked very upset.

"Don't you worry your head about that, sir," said Quartermaster-sergeant Vanek, trying to console him. "I've been on three different drafts and it was just six of one and half a dozen of the other, sir, not a scrap of difference between them. They all got cut to pieces with the whole battalion, and then what was left of us had to be reorganized. The worst of the lot was the ninth. Every man Jack of them was taken prisoner, N. C. O's and company commander and all. And I'd have been taken as well, only I just happened to have gone to fetch the company's regular issue of rum, and that's what saved me."

"It strikes me," remarked Lieutenant Lukash, "that you're a bit of a boozer. But don't imagine that the next time we go into action you'll just happen to have gone to fetch an issue of rum. As soon as I spotted your red nose, I had you sized up all right."

"That's from the Carpathians, sir. When we got our rations

up there, they were always cold. The trenches were in the snow ; we wasn't allowed to make fires, and rum was the only thing we had to keep us going. And if it hadn't been for me, it would have been like in the other companies, where they hadn't got any rum and the men were frozen. The rum gave all of us red noses. The only drawback was that orders came from the battalion that only men with red noses were to be sent out on patrol duty."

"Well, the winter's practically over now," remarked the lieutenant meaningly.

"You can't do without rum, sir, in the field, whatever season it is. It keeps you in good spirits, as you might say. When a man's got a drop of rum inside him, he's ready to go for anyone. Hallo, who's that knocking at the door? Silly ass, can't he read what it says on the door : 'Don't knock. Come in'?"

Lieutenant Lukash turned on his chair toward the door, and he saw the door open slowly and softly. And just as slowly and softly the good soldier Schweik entered the office of draft No. 11.

Lieutenant Lukash closed his eyes at the sight of the good soldier Schweik, who gazed at him with much the same gratification as might have been displayed by the prodigal son when he saw his father killing the fatted calf.

"Beg to report, sir, I'm back again," announced Schweik from the doorway, with such frank informality that Lieutenant Lukash suddenly realized what had befallen him. Ever since Colonel Schroder had informed him that Schweik was being sent back to afflict him, Lieutenant Lukash had been hoping against hope that the evil hour might be indefinitely postponed. Every morning he said to himself: "He won't be here to-day. He may have got into trouble again, so perhaps they'll keep him there." But now Schweik had upset all these expectations by turning up in that bland and unassuming manner of his.

Schweik now gazed at Quartermaster-sergeant Vanek and turning to him, handed to him with a smile some papers which he took from the pocket of his greatcoat.

"Beg to report, Sergeant," he said, "I've got to hand you these papers that they signed in the regimental office. It's about my pay and rations allowance."

Schweik's demeanour in the office of draft No. 11 was as free-and-easy as if he and Quartermaster-sergeant Vanek were old cronies. The Quartermaster-sergeant, however, replied curtly:

"Put 'em down on the table."

"I think, Sergeant," said Lieutenant Lukash, with a sigh, "that you'd better leave me alone with Schweik."

Vanek went out and stood listening at the door to hear what these two would say to each other. At first he heard nothing, for Schweik and Lieutenant Lukash held their peace. For a long time they looked at each other and watched each other closely.

Lieutenant Lukash broke this painful silence by a remark, to which he endeavoured to impart a strong dose of irony:

"Well, I'm glad to see you again, Schweik. It's very kind of you to look me up. Just fancy now, what a charming visitor !"

But his feelings got the better of him, and he gave vent to his bottled-up arrears of annoyance by banging his fist on the table, so that the ink pot gave a jerk and ink was spilled over the pay roll. He also jumped up, thrust his face close to Schweik and yelled at him :

"You bloody fool!"

Whereupon he began to stride up and down the narrow office, spitting whenever he came past Schweik.

"Beg to report, sir," said Schweik, while Lieutenant Lukash continued to pace up and down and kept furiously flinging into a corner crumpled scraps of paper which he snatched from the table each time he came near it, "I handed over that letter just as you told me. I found Mrs. Kâkonyi all right, and I don't mind saying that she's a fine figure of a woman, although when I saw her she was crying -"

Lieutenant Lukash sat down on the quartermaster-sergeant's mattress and exclaimed hoarsely :

"When is this foolery going to stop, Schweik?"

Schweik continued, as if he had not heard the lieutenant's exclamation :

"Well, then there was a little bit of unpleasantness, but I took all the blame for it. Of course, they wouldn't believe that I'd been writing letters to the lady, so I thought I'd better swallow the letter at the cross-examination, so as to put them off the scent, like.

Then—how it happened I don't know, unless it was just a stroke of bad luck—I got mixed up in a little bit of a shindy, nothing worth talking about, really. Anyhow, I managed to get out of that, and they admitted I wasn't to blame, and sent me to the regimental orderly room and stopped all further inquiries into it. I waited in the regimental office for a few minutes, till the colonel arrived, and he gave me a bit of a wigging and said I was to report myself to you as company orderly, and told me I was to tell you to go to him at once about this here draft. That's more than half an hour ago, but the colonel didn't know they was going to take me into the regimental office again and that I'd have
to
hang about there for another quarter of an hour because I've got back pay coming to me for all this time, and I'd got to collect it from the regiment and not from the draft, because I was entered on the list as being under close arrest with the regiment. They've got everything here
so
muddled and mixed up that it's enough to give you the staggers."

When Lieutenant Lukash heard that he ought to have been with Colonel Schroder half an hour earlier, he hastily put on his tunic and said :

"You've done me another good turn, Schweik."

He said it in such an utterly dejected and despairing tone that Schweik endeavoured to console him with a kindly word, which he addressed to Lieutenant Lukash as he was dashing out of the doorway:

"The colonel don't mind waiting, sir ; he ain't got anything to do, anyhow."

Shortly after the lieutenant had departed, Quartermaster-sergeant Vanek came in.

Schweik was sitting on a chair and throwing pieces of coal into the small iron stove, the flap of which was open. The stove smoked and stank, and Schweik continued his amusement, without perceiving the quartermaster-sergeant, who watched Schweik for a while, but then suddenly kicked the flap to, and told Schweik to clear out.

"Sorry, Sergeant," said Schweik with dignity, "but let me tell you that I can't obey your order, much as I'd like to, because I'm under higher authority.

"You see, Sergeant, it's like this," he added, with a touch of pride, "I'm company orderly. Colonel Schroder, he arranged for me to be attached to draft No. 11 with Lieutenant Lukash who I used to be batman to, but owing to my natural gumption, as you might say, I've been promoted to orderly. Me and the lieutenant are quite old pals. What was you in civil life, Sergeant?"

Quartermaster-sergeant Vanek was so taken by surprise when the good soldier Schweik addressed him in this free-and-easy, hail-fellow-well-met manner, that without standing on his dignity, as he so much liked to do when brought into contact with the rank-and-file, he replied as if he were Schweik's subordinate :

"I kept a druggist's shop at Kralup."

"I was apprenticed to a shop keeper once," said Schweik. "I worked for a chap named Kokoshka, in Prague. He was a rum cove, he was. One day I put a match, by mistake, to a barrel of benzine in the cellar, and it all caught light, and he chucked me out, and the Shopkeepers' Association wouldn't get me another job, so just through a barrel of benzine I couldn't finish
my
apprenticeship. Do you make powders for cows?"

Quartermaster-sergeant Vanek shook his head.

"We used to make powders for cows and wrapped them up in pictures of saints. Our boss was as pious as they make 'em, and one day he read in a book that St. Peregrine was useful to cows when they've got spasms. So he had some pictures of St. Peregrine printed somewhere at Smichow and had them consecrated at the Emaus monastery for 200 gulden. And then we wrapped them up in the packets of our powders for cows. You mixed the powder in warm water, and made the cow drink it out of a bucket, while you recited a little prayer to St. Peregrine that had been made up by Mr. Tauchen, our shopman. You see, when these pictures of St. Peregrine had been printed, there had to be a little prayer of some sort on the other side. So in the evening old Kokoshka sent for Mr. Tauchen and told him he'd got to make up a prayer to go on the picture for the cows' powders, and he'd got to have it ready when he came to the shop the
next
morning, so as it could be sent to the printers. It was wanted in a hurry because the cows was waiting for this little prayer. It was a case of take it or leave it, as you might say. If he made a good job of it, he'd

have a gulden in hard cash, and if he didn't, he'd have a fortnight's notice. Well, Mr. Tauchen sat up all night in a regular sweat, and when he came to open the shop in the morning he looked absolutely washed out, and he hadn't written a line. In fact, he'd forgotten the name of the saint who made the powders do the cows good. And then our handy-man Ferdinand helped him out of the fix. He was a smart chap, he was. He just said, 'Let's have a squint at it,' and then Mr. Tauchen sent for some beer. But before I was back again with the beer, Ferdinand had finished writing half of the prayer. It went like this :